Media Temple launched their latest offerings today along with a redesigned site. After logging in, current (ss) users will see a new button allowing them to migrate to the new (gs) platform. The (gs) runs at $20/month for 100GB of storage and a terabyte of bandwidth. I’m not sure how the pricing works for those that have already purchased the (ss) a while back.
As Michael Arrington noted, there is not much competition for Media Temple’s Grid-Server. The nearest competition charges five times what (mt) does. The load on the (gs) is spread out over many servers, not allowing for traffic spikes to negatively alter performance. However, if your site does receive a major spike in traffic you will be charged for overages in bandwidth and CPU usage, that is if you can consume anywhere near 1 TB of bandwidth.
Kudos to Demian and the whole (mt) crew for a job well done. Be sure to check out the TalkCrunch podcast.
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I’m already in the migration process!!! But yeah when I was on the phone with Customer Support yesterday I asked him would it cost anything more for me next year. And he said nope same price. So I think for us current (ss) users it should just be the same $119.40 per year or whatever the price is per month.
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I have heard several times that it is the same price except the new (gs) measures you usage in terms of “grid power units”. If you have a very active website, you may be forced to upgrade and get more GPUs.
I not exactly sure how it is going to work but from what I have read you would have to get dugg and Slashdoted several times everyday to even think about upgrading.
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Kory,
Though the price of the (gs) Grid-Server has gone up in price slightly (well worth it in my opinion), we absolutely did not want to leave our current (ss) Shared customers out to dry which is why we are offering the same pricing for the lateral migration into the (gs) Grid service.
Sean,
You are right in your understanding the resource limits. Those limits are very generous. It would take an awful lot of website traffic to even come close to using a tera in a given month. The same applies to GPUs.
- David
- Software Developer (mt)
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Since you are right here David, few quick questions:
-Is that same pricing for existing customers forever or just until their current plan expires? Can we renew for the same $7.95?
-How much load can it handle before we have you pay more?
-Would this be a good solution for podcasts, almost like cachefly except not local?
-Any idea on overage costs?
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Maybe I can tackle some of these questions Sean. As David mentioned earlier, it can handle a bunch of load before you even have to consider paying more/upgrading. Just a guess, but you would have to get something like 25+k pageviews everyday before you even had to consider upgrading. As for pricing after your current plan expires, you will likely have to pay the full $20/month.
With a terabyte of bandwidth this would be great for podcasts, or even vidcasts. Cachefly is way too expensive for the amateur podcaster. I don’t think they released the details regarding overage costs yet.
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Sound good, Thanks Paul.
I did a website for a celebrity and they plugged their site on live TV with something like 15 million people watching. After one second it was down and nobody else got on. We lost several hundred thousand visitors in a matter of seconds. I just wish be had something like (gs). If we did then the forum would have had thousands more people.
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I would think that you would remain at the same price for the lifetime of your contract, as long as you don’t upgrade or cancel.
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Yeah, same price until the contract is over. If you bought a 2 year (ss) and you migrate to (gs) with one year left you don’t have to pay extra. When that year is up, I’d assume that renewing it would cost the regular $20/month.
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Well I guess I consider a contract the duration of your hosting career. Like renewals would still be considered part of the same contract.
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I hope that we only pay $8/month forever. I was debating the other day if I should renew for another few years, but that is a pretty high risk.
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From (mt)’s stance though, letting users pay their current rate forever isn’t too wise.
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Like Kory I’m already in the migration process, I logged onto my account center this morning to see the (gs) had been unleashed. It will be interesting to see what the price plans are like in 8 months, when my current (ss) contract runs out.
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Ha ha, then it’s a good thing that I signed up for a two year plan.
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Oh gee. This new GS product line from Media Temple makes me want to sell my small hosting business. It really is the best hosting product on the market. It’s hard to compete with that sort of offering.
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I’ve taken the plunge and so far have a few experiences to share:
* overall the control panel is good, file manager needs some work, however.
some examples:
- some directories I can delete in the file manager, some I cannot.
- can’t just extract tarballs and gzips by clicking on them within the file manager. I have to log into the shell and use tar -xvvzf from there
- you can install applications from panel but there’s no option to uninstall them
- if you manage to delete something from file manager, it’s gone. it doesnt get placed in a trash area for pending deletion (which also gives the user a chance to recover it if selected in error)
* after-sales service is superb.
some examples:
- signed up, had a small issue, sent off an email. within 10 mins, i had a detailed reply which contained exact relevant information and resolved my issue immediately.
- their kb covered every single obvious question i had (ie. how do i setup multiple sites on this?) . the wealth of information in their kb lets me help myself immediately, instead of waiting on an answer from their support dept.
- very well formatted, easy to navigate, easy to read.
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From the (mt) site:
“Will I have to pay more for (gs)?
No, current (ss) Shared Server customers will pay the same price that you have been paying for your account. example: if you have been paying $7.95 per month for your (ss) Shared Server Pro account, then you will pay $7.95 for your (gs) Grid Server Lite.”
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Just so you all know if you want to pay the same amount of money then you are only going to get the lite version, which is basically ss + clustering. I am very angry.
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Sean, it’s the (gs) with the same bandwidth/storage limits as your (ss) had *I think*.
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Yeah, it’s the exact same as ss but with the clustering. I am very upset, I thought that it was a full migration to the full gs. $20 isn’t a lot of money but I was only paying $6.75 before.
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I don’t consider this a bad thing at all. I never come close to my (ss) limits. I’ll be fine with the clustering and added features (gs) brings. Other hosts would leave you on the current (ss) system and make you pay to upgrade. I’m very pleased (mt) is upgrading us for free.
BTW, only 20 more minutes until my step 1 is done! Once (gs) is activated I can tell it’s going to be a long night.
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Here’s my understanding of the situation….
When you migrate you have to choose a new contract… So instead of my (ss) hosting ending in jan. I have a new contract that will cover me till this time next year and they just credited my account the extra money that was left.
Also bandersnatch, I called tech support last night they’re looking into the deleting problem. I couldn’t delete one of my subdomains from my ftp client. It sounds as if you’ve been raised on cPanel, or something similar.
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Kory,
Right you are. My last few hosts have used cpanel.
Overall, I am happy with mediatemple’s (gs) but there’s some slight room for improvement. :)
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I migrated to gs this morning, but all of my websites (alternate domains as mt calls them) now redirect to the primary domain rather than acting as their own site. I submitted a support ticket hours ago for it, but no word yet on what’s going on. There isn’t anything in the control panel that allows me to “fix” this myself (I haven’t found anything at least) and if I try to modify or delete an alternate domain’s DNS zone, it acts as if it’s going to completely modify or delete the primary zone entry instead.
I don’t know if this is a bug or what, but all of my alternate sites (about 5) are completely offline because the URL redirects to the primary domain. Grrrr.
Just wanted to give somewhat of a warning shot to anyone who is on mt with alternate domains and thinking of moving to the grid.
Yeah that’s the first couple of things I had to get used to when I switched. I think most of the (mt) users rarely logged into the old accountcenter, they did most of their things through ftp. And only used it when setting up a database.
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@Shane
Did you try calling them? I know their has to be alot of support tickets in at the moment…. So it might take awhile to get to your ticket.
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Ok…figured out why all of my alternate domains were redirecting to the primary domain. Somehow, during the migration, the rules in my primary domain’s .htaccess file got copied over to ALL of my alternate domains. I had a 301 redirect in there when I moved my primary domain months ago. That rule was copied to all of my other .htaccess files for my alternate domains for some reason.
Might be something you guys should be aware of when you migrate. Check your .htaccess files to make sure they don’t get modified.
I am getting about 65% of the speed I was getting last week on (ss). I have a test file here (acutally a Broken episode) if you want to test it for yourself: http://s554.gridserver.com/thebroken2.avi
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Hrm, downloading that file seems to max out my cable download speed ~400KB/sec.
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Average ~500KB/s, Max ~700KB/s
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I’m doing step 3 right now. I was quite disappointed not to be able to select quarterly billing, but only monthly and yearly. I’ll be going for a yearly prepayment, but it’s not quite friendly from them.
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I’m also noticing a distinct drop in speed, both when downloading files (I’ve tried the AVI above and files from my own account) and also while generally navigating via FTP, which is a stark contrast to the speeds of before which went as fast as my connection could handle. I earnestly hope that the speed issues are a temporary issue due to all the migrations and whatnot and won’t continue for long.
Otherwise, I’m a big fan of the grid system. It’s nice to know it can handle digg/etc even better than before (which was still a hell of a lot better than Dreamhost ever could), and I really like the new control panel — almost as much as I disliked the old one! ;)
Well done Media Temple, but please do work on the speeds.
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Just upgraded to (gs) Grid-Server Lite, and I really like what I see. However, I also have that annoying problem related to deleting folders. Doesn’t seam like I have the permission, or something.
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Currently I have a virtual private (sxpen$ive) with Media Temple. I was considering moving over to the Grid Server when I found out they do not have reverse DNS setup. This is a big problem. It’s the reason I left Mosso.com. NOT haveing valid RDNS is a major issue for those of us that have email which gets generated from web pages (ie PHP mail() )
Anyway, I was bummed out when I found this out. As soon as they fix this I’m ditching my virtual private and going Grid.
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Hm… The comments on the Talkcrunch post on the subject is overwhelmingly negative with those who signed up mostly citing a SLOWDOWN in speed compared with the previous shared programs. In addition, several mention slow customer service responses, althouigh I have to say I have found them very reactive by phone…
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